The thing that helped me choose between a 670 and a 7950 is considering noise. The 79xx series seems to be overrun with coil whine while it's relatively rare with Geforce 600 series. I also notice that coil whine becomes more and more of a problem for the faster you go (ie., cheaper overclocked cards by Sapphire or XFX tend to have more reports of it, high end expensive primo products like MSI Lightning not so much). So when you have a 7950 series card pushing up to 950 or higher, you get more reports of coil whine with that product.
Some of the highest end versions of the card are better about it than others, but those aren't the cards that make the 7950 or 7970 a performance/value king. They're the extreme high end. Meanwhile, the value 660 Ti's or 670's seem to be as rare to have coil whine as the deluxe.
I can't stand beeps and whines and noises. I want my PC quiet. I can't have cheap component selection by AMD adding noise to my otherwise quiet PC. And just because YOU can't hear it, that doesn't mean it's not there. It means YOU can't hear it. My hearing is sensitive enough that I would...
Read some reviews of AMD cards and invariably on the ones you consider a deal or that are on sale (XFX, Sapphire, reference cards), you'll see reports of people discussing lots of coil whine.
Performance is mostly comparable between the two brands aside from the frame rate latency problems (it's not microstutter, it just looks kinda like it; microstutter is when you're dealing with SLI/CF and that's a whole other kettle of fish) that AMD may correct. It's funny to see people here arguing that it's not a problem when AMD themselves said it was a real problem and one they are trying to correct with a new memory management in their drivers.
If the company who designed the GPU and the drivers for said GPU says there's a problem, ...there's a problem. That said, they say they're going to fix it, so...
When I was buying my 670, the price for my Gigabyte non-reference 670 was $30-50 more (with Borderlands 2) than the 7950 most days and $40-60 less than the 7970 (non-GE) most days. I figured I'd get performance between those two cards from game to game.
I tried to find a single Radeon card that didn't have widespread user reviews of coil whine and the only ones that lacked that were either new cards that hadn't been out very long (so next to no user reviews) or ones that were like the MSI Lightning (no value argument there).
And the 7970 GE specifically was not much more than the 7970, so I considered it, but the card ran hotter and louder even with custom cooling (like the same tri-fan cooler on my Gigabyte 670) than equivalent Geforce products. You can go right now and read about the 7970 GE with the same cooler as my 670 where a user review is saying the card throttles at 70 degrees and others who say it is much louder there than on any other card where that cooler is used.
For me, performance is great up to a certain point. Then silence is golden. If I get a LOT of the performance most of the time, but I don't have coil whine or loud fans trying to keep up with a hotter part, then... I can deal with not having the theory of more performance.
Especially when for most of the time these Radeon cards have been out they've had a problem with frame latency that even AMD admits exists. Again, just because you don't notice it doesn't mean you won't be amazed if/when they fix it. It also doesn't mean that others don't already notice it...
My focus wound falling on ensuring I got a quiet part. It's not that every Radeon 79xx series has coil whine or loud fans. It's just that some really, really do and the Geforce line just seems built a lot better toward keeping things quieter whereas the Radeon based on user reviews is a crapshoot.
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